NEWSPAPER'S ROLE

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 142, 18 June 1931, Page 7

NEWSPAPER'S ROLE

CIVILISING INFLUENCE

"We were partly without newspapers during the week of the general strike of the year 1926, and most of us were like ships without charts or compasses," writes Mr. Robert Gunn Davis, in the "Scots Observer."

"Some of us who are rather careful students of affairs felt as a doctor would feel if he had to diagnose without his stethoscope. A few weeks of that experience would have put us as much out of touch with tho world as if we lived in Greenland. The newspaper is one of our greatest -civilising influences. But it is more. It is the greatest vehicle of culture, since it reaches myriads of people who have neither the time nor the opportunity to read books. It is, moreover, as important to the thinker as it is to the artisan; to tho labourer on the land as it is to the landowner; to the sailor on the sea as it is to tho settler* in remote parts. The newspaper has enabled millions to enjoy reading who but for it would have been all but illiterate.

"It has given them a glimmer of what mental culture means, and some opportunity of developing that broad human spirit without which racial suspicion and class antagonism would be more acute and more devastating to civilisation than they are. It is better that people should read than that they should not read.

"If they read books as well as newspapers, so much tho better, but even if they read nothing but newspapers there is still some hope for their cultural emancipation. We must not underrate the value of contemplation of the beauty of tho land and the sea and the sky.

"We must not overlook tho manifold advantages of looking at peoples, of being humble patrons of the fine arts, painting, music, sculpture, the drama; but thoro is something still more potent in its influence on us, for it serves as a connecting . link with all these. This is reading, without which all life would bo disconnected, unharmonious, reactionary, and in danger of falling into decadence, in spite of all the arts. Greece, and Rome, and Carthage, and Mexico, and Peru would probably have found it oasier to resist the influences making for disintegration if tho populace had been able to read, and if they had had newspapers as we know them.

"Criticism of tlio newspaper from whomsoever it comes is unjustified. Reading is our great means of contact with one another, and without it, in its most popular form, wo should bo a prey to the reactions that destroyed some of the earliest efforts of man towards civilisation."